Books, Madness, Books, Madness...Did I mention books?

vrijdag 1 augustus 2014

Depressed.
Defiant. Possible alcoholic. These are just a few of the terms used to
describe fifteen-year-old Jacob Jasper Jones. Lately, though, JJ has a
new one to add to the list: detective. He’s been having strange dreams
about the fire that killed his parents ten years ago, and he thinks he
finally has the clue to catching the arsonist who destroyed his family.

A murder investigation isn’t the only thing the dreams trigger for JJ,
though. They also lead to secret meetings with his estranged sister, an
unlikely connection with a doctor who lost his daughter in the fire, and
a confusing friendship with McKinley, a classmate of JJ’s who seems
determined to help him solve the mystery.

All JJ wants is to
shake the problems that have followed him since that fire, and he’s
convinced he must catch the arsonist to do it. But as JJ struggles to
find the culprit, he sees there’s more than one mystery in his life he
needs to solve.

Author Bio

Johanna
Parkhurst grew up on a small dairy farm in northern Vermont before
relocating to the rocky mountains of Colorado. She spends her days
helping teenagers learn to read and write and her evenings writing
things she hopes they’ll like to read. She strives to share stories of
young adults who are as determined, passionate, and complex as the ones
she shares classrooms with.

Book Excerpt

A smell that wasn’t there before filled
the bathroom.

JJ drew in a deep breath, trying
to match the scent to anything that might already exist in his short memory. It
was a difficult scent to describe: like pine trees, but not the real ones in
his backyard. More like the smell of the stuff his father used to clean the
kitchen floor.

He tried to push off the sudden
sense of apprehension that filled him; who cared if someone else had also come
into the restroom? This was his town, the tiny world he had spent his entire
five years in, and there was a good chance he knew whoever else had just joined
him.

Even if he didn’t know anyone
who went around smelling like pine trees.

JJ took a few breaths and
flushed the toilet, eager to get back to the movie and his parents.

As he shoved the door of the
stall open, though, the scent grew stronger. The person who had brought the
scent in with him—a man—was facing the wall across the room. He was wearing a
backpack and hugging his arms to his chest.

“I did it… I did it,” the man
whispered. “I finally did it.”

JJ moved to the sinks, more
eager than ever to return to the comforting gaze of his mother. But the noise
of his sneakers against the tile alerted the man to JJ’s presence, and now the
stranger was turning around to face him.

It was the oddest sensation to
only be able to see certain details of a person: blue jeans, a red long-sleeve
shirt. And then a detail so clear it almost seemed to be the only thing JJ
could see: the outline of a long and winding paintbrush, tattooed on the man’s
hand, snaking down from just below his thumb to where it disappeared beneath
the cuff of his shirt.

But nothing else. No other
details were there. The man was faceless. The color of hair was… what was it?
It was as if it had never been there.

Then JJ could see nothing, and
all he could hear was the man shouting. Something about how JJ shouldn’t be
there, and he couldn’t know, and it wasn’t time yet….

The pain began then. Horrible,
burning, pain, and JJ knew he was screaming, but he couldn’t hear himself over
the roaring in his ears. He needed to find the door, the door, where was the
door—

Jacob Jasper Jones woke up sweating, twisted into a trap of
sheets and blankets. He frantically cast his eyes around the walls of his
bedroom, looking for anything that would remind him he was not in that restroom again. There was the Modest Mouse poster, his
bookshelf, the old dresser that had once belonged to his aunt—yes, he was safe.

Safe from what? Or who?

JJ quietly wrestled with the covers, thankful that he wasn’t a
screamer and didn’t seem to have woken Aunt Maggie up. If it was up to JJ,
Maggie would never know that JJ was having dreams about that day again.

They’d started about a month ago. Before then JJ had never dreamed
anything specific about the fire. The nightmares were always vague and mushy,
filled with flames and noise and not much else.

Not like this dream. This dream was clear and specific and so real it
was as though JJ was reenacting every detail from that day. Right up until the
end, when the faceless man turned and everything went black.

It was so vivid that JJ was starting to think it might be more than
just a dream. That it might be a memory.